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What chance of revival after the elections?

Labour's surge of membership and support under Corbyn bucked the trend of the decline of Europe's other left parties. Is it now back on course to fade into the night — or will a new wave of activism save it? Asks NICK WRIGHT

LABOUR under Sir Keir Starmer has stalled. Where there was once a policy ferment that proved its capacity to mobilise millions, there is now a studied silence. Numbers are down — around 100,000 people have dropped their connection with the party.

Elections are exercises in human endeavour and party members know from practical experience over the last few weeks that — with local exceptions — there is nothing like the enthusiasm which transformed the 2017 general election campaign or even the sense of duty and dogged determination that drove the 2019 contest.

A mixed election result has confirmed the failure of Labour’s national leadership.

Much turned on the handling of the Covid crisis. A chance encounter with a senior NHS medic this week brought home the direct consequence of Labour’s Starmer stasis on the key issue which should be the party’s strongest point.

Retiring this week after decades of NHS service she spelled out the ways in which the government’s serial incompetence has made working in the NHS a trial. And she predicted that thousands of health professionals will leave.

Instead of working to proven best practice and responding to the Sage specialists, the government has used the pandemic to further privatise health while wasting enormous sums on incompetent and corrupt private-sector contractors. Only the success of the NHS-led vaccination programme mitigates this mess-up.

She contrasted this with the successes of strategies pursued by other countries. She pointed out examples in Britain where local authorities devised their own support programmes and were able to achieve local success in reducing the rate of infection. She speculated that much more could have been done nationally if income support for people testing positive had been in place.

Her views were trenchantly expressed, laced with anger and grounded in practical experience. Not even a Labour voter, her biggest disappointment is the failure of Starmer to criticise the government’s approach and his failure, Labour’s failure, to articulate a clear set of alternative policies.

Hartlepool was not a stunning Tory victory. Compared with the general election result the Tory vote went up a bit but for every Hartlepool citizen who cast their vote for the Tory, three-and-half didn’t.

In a electorate of over 70,000 the Tories got 15,529 votes (up on their 11869 vote in 2019) cannibalising a proportion of the Brexit Party’s 10,603 votes.

Labour’s vote dropped from its 2017 high of 21,969 to a still winning 15,464 in 2019 to 8,589 in 2021.

Nearly 6,000 votes went to the usual by election circus but half the Brexit Party vote and a great part of Labour’s previous support simply disappeared.

Hartlepool was a defeat but not the unqualified Tory triumph that the media have deemed it. And the nationwide picture showed that Labour can still draw on substantial reservoirs of working-class support.

Labour advanced in Wales under a capable leadership that has quietly defined itself against the national party. In a variety of places where Labour has strong local leadership with distinctive policies and substantial achievements it held on and even advanced.

With a further two seats lost Scotland remains a disaster zone for Labour amid bizarre manoeuvring around second preferences that further eroded the class conscious vote.

Meanwhile London is rapidly becoming a city where Lib Dems are on the slide and voters are imposing on the politicians — through the mechanism of the transferable vote — a de facto Labour Green pole.

The left needs to take into account the latter factor. A portion of Labour’s vote has moved towards the Greens and a bigger proportion now makes informed tactical decisions in places where a Green or Labour vote might have the greater anti-Tory utility.

The disconnect between Labour’s leadership, the membership and its electorate is almost entirely the product of the strategy pursued by that leadership.

When Starmer said he would bear responsibility for the widely anticipated electoral setback he meant it in the traditional (and BBC) bureaucratic sense that when blame needs to be apportioned then deputy heads will roll.

And in a classic dead cat strategy to divert attention Angela Rayner was removed as party chair. At the time and in retrospect it is hard to imagine what Starmer thought he would achieve by this.

It is true that in her climb to the top Ms Rayner has casually abandoned much of the good will that accompanied her rise. Her particular brand of presentational politics trades so promiscuously on her class origins that she must imagine that her backstory might discount the serial betrayals that accompanied her ascent.

If indeed she had been allowed to exercise any decisive command over the election campaign then sacking her as party chair — in the wake of these election results — might have made some sense. But no-one believes she is personally responsible for very much at all. She was intended to be that dead cat but a measure of Starmer’s own weakened standing is that her position is now strengthened.

And in a sordid postscript to the weekend’s wrangling, Starmer’s PPS has resigned amid allegations that she spread rumours about Rayner’s private life.

Labour is increasingly confounded by Starmer’s leadership style. The long Covid lockdown on party democracy, the increasingly centralised control and the ever-diminishing prospects of a party conference which might impose some measure of control over the overweening party bureaucracy adds to the sense of powerlessness felt by party members.

Some imagine that a revival of a Corbyn-type domestic programme combined with a passive position of support for nuclear weapons, Nato membership allied to a bipartisan foreign policy might tempt the right wing to cease hostilities and allow all to settle back into a comfortable centrism.

Some are invested in a return to shadow cabinet office of a token contingent of leftwingers in a warmed-over version of the notional unity that Starmer paraded in his bid for Labour leadership.

The more realistic see a long battle within the hostile structures of the party machinery as necessary. The clearest thinkers on the left see the need to reconnect with Labour’s natural working-class base with an emancipatory politics of mass extra-parliamentary action.

One sign of creative thinking has been the Socialist Campaign Group’s alternative Queen’s Speech and the return to street politics by the forces rallied by the People’s Assembly suggests that the long, long night may be over.

Another welcome sign is the growing resistance to the return of the Blairite ghouls. The utter idiocy and public relations ineptitude in gifting that twice disgraced grifter Peter Mandelson a central role in Labour’s messaging just when the Tory party is mired again in sleaze defies any rational explanation.

That is unless it is a signal that the purge is to be unending and Labour is to be returned to the neoliberal economics and imperial warmongering associated with these creatures.

Hope over reason, the disquiet evident even in Westminster Labour allied to clear demands from trade union leaders that Mandelson be put back in his ermine-lined box encourages us.

Experience has taught us that the ebb and flow of inner party struggle in Labour’s ramified structures never ceases and so long as the party retains the potential to challenge power and wealth there will always be a powerful impetus for progressive politics.

But there is a question to be faced: is Labour sufficiently distinctive as a federal party of individual members, trade unions and socialist societies to avoid the fate of social democratic parties throughout the capitalist world?

The French Parti Socialiste is on 6 per cent, Germany’s SPD on 15 per cent, Pasok in Greece barely figures in polls and its various offshoots do little better, Irish Labour is on 5 per cent, the Dutch PvdA is on 6 per cent.

There are outposts of continued social democratic presence in Scandinavia and parts of Southern Europe but the general picture is one of a loss of cohesion and credibility, a crisis of ideas and organisation marked by a growing separation from the working class.

The Corbyn revival — of policies, party life and votes — was a striking departure from this pattern and everything about the right-wing counter-attack is an illustration of how the ruling class sees in Labour’s latent appeal a real danger to their power and wealth.

The temporary setbacks we are experiencing is both an illustration of how clearly the ruling class sees this threat and how big capital operates within Labour.

For the working class to exercise a decisive influence on national politics through electoral struggles then the personification of capital by what is mistakenly labelled as “centrism” must be excised. The struggle against this right wing, if confined to Labour’s structures, will be a wasted effort without the return of the working class to mass politics and extra-parliamentary action.

Stay on top of Covid issues with the Independent Sage YouTube channel at www.mstar.link/sage21.

Nick Wright blogs at 21centurymanifesto.

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